Oscar-Nominated Actor Struggled to Make Ends Meet During Awards Season

This awards season, Hollywood witnessed one particularly inspiring Cinderella story when Barkhad Abdi, a Somali-American limo driver and mobile-phone salesman, earned an Academy Award nomination for his first-ever film role, as a ship hijacker and pirate leader in Captain Phillips, a film based on real events. (He even earned a monologue shout-out from Ellen DeGeneres this past Sunday.) Although the actor’s coming-out has been particularly incredible, the New Yorker reports, via a recent profile, that Abdi is still struggling to make ends meet after earning only $65,000 for his nominated supporting role opposite Tom Hanks.

Abdi tells the New Yorker that after wrapping production on the Paul Greengrass film, he returned to his job as a cell phone salesman at a mall in Minneapolis before ultimately deciding to quit on the film’s premiere date. “How I thought about it was like, ‘When the movie came out, reviews are either gonna be good or bad. Either way, I cannot be working here.’” And since then, throughout the film’s promotional circuit of the film and awards season, Abdi says he was subsisting on per diems granted to him from Sony.

Abdi, who told The Hollywood Reporter before the Oscars that he's
planning to move to Los Angeles, had been subsisting on a per diem
when he was promoting the film in Hollywood. The per diem's good at
the Beverly Hilton, where Sony had been putting him up. In the weeks
leading up to the Oscars, he was attending events in a town car, which
is only available for official publicity events. A friend, a Somali
cabdriver from Minneapolis, has been driving him around for free. His
clothes for many awards events were loaners.

Even though Abdi did not take home a statuette this past Sunday—he lost out to Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club—it seemed as though the awards-season experience still seemed too good to be true for the actor. When we ran into Abdi and his friend and Captain Phillips co-star, Faysal Ahmed, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party on Sunday night, Ahmed told us that they had both moved to Los Angeles just three days before. “I feel like jumping but have to keep it under control,” he said. “This is the best party we’ve ever been to.”

Now that awards season has come to a close, though, what’s next for the actor? This past January, he told a reporter that he was reviewing scripts and reading for a television show. Late last month, The Hollywood Reporterbroke news that the Oscar nominee was being considered to play South African marathoner and Zulu warrior Willie Mtolo in a film about the athlete called The Place That Hits the Sun. Regardless of which project he picks, we hope to see Abdi boomerang back onscreen with another gritty role, and wish him a long and happy Hollywood career.